Have I Been Pwned, the service that lets you check whether your email address has leaked, on October 27 added more than 345,000 unique email addresses from the breach of Germany's AfD party. According to Help Net Security, the service flagged the leak as sensitive, so it cannot be searched publicly.
What leaked
According to reports, the hackers gained access to the party's mail servers at the end of September, and the material was published on an anonymous site and via BitTorrent. It includes hundreds of thousands of messages, about 420,000 according to some reports, as well as excerpts from member databases of several state branches and data the party requested from population registers for campaign purposes.
What the party says
AfD confirmed the breach, reported it to security authorities and said the owners of affected mailboxes were notified. According to the party, only a small number of mailboxes were copied, and most had not been used for years. Researchers who examined the material consider it genuine, but no original email has been verified so far.
Why it is interesting
Breaches of political parties have become a central tool in influence battles, from the 2016 Democratic National Committee hack to today. Whatever one thinks of the party, the leak also exposes personal data of many people who are not politicians, and highlights how vulnerable the email systems of political organizations are, in Israel too.
